Employee Spotlight #29: David Axelrod, Software Engineer at BoldVoice
Frederick Daso
MBA Candidate at Harvard Business School | Senior Investor & Head of Platform at GC Venture Fellows
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David Axelrod is a self-taught engineer with a finance background. He thrives in small teams with a lot of individual responsibility. When not at work, he enjoys theater, archery, and playing Age of Empires II.
Frederick Daso: What was your journey to becoming a software engineer (SWE) at BoldVoice?
David Axelrod: I studied finance in college and participated in student groups for entrepreneurship, where we often wanted to develop a consumer app or website. Out of necessity, I started learning to program and found that I enjoy building apps that are useful for other people. After working in a large bank for two years post-college, I left to build my own consumer e-commerce app. I've always enjoyed learning about new startups, and I eventually heard about BoldVoice through YCombinator. A pair of industrious immigrant founders working on a problem that real people have today? I jumped at the opportunity to join the team.
Daso: There's a lot of conventional career advice about being a successful software engineer, but are there any unorthodox lessons that you've learned through experience or been taught through mentorship that more of your fellow SWEs should know?
Axelrod: Write more unit tests. I swear it's the best thing you can do for existing feature stability, making it much easier to scale and add new functionality in the future. I also like to take up side projects when I can, as it's always easier to learn a new framework if you have a practical application.
Daso: What's the toughest project (professionally or personally) that you worked on as an SWE or in general? What were the most important lessons you learned from that project?
Axelrod: Initially, BoldVoice had some performance issues in our main product. The 90 percentile loading time was >12 seconds, and the median load time was 6 seconds. After extensive profiling, I found several areas where we could improve responsiveness across the stack. After implementing some lazy loading here, and some query optimizations there, I could get consistently fast app loads. Today, median load times stand at 1.1 seconds, and the 90% percentile is 3.1 seconds. Users have also mentioned that the app seems faster.
Daso: Who are some of the most inspirational people you've gotten to work with during your career in tech?
Axelrod: An electrical engineer named Matt Gil. We worked on several projects together, ranging from a fleet of drones that pressure wash windows to an?automatic cocktail machine . He taught me how to solder and wire relays. He's a professional tinkerer, and I'm a better, more curious engineer having worked with him.
Daso: How would you define your company's culture, and how does it create an environment where you can do your best work?
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Axelrod: At BoldVoice, we focus on user feedback. User interviews are a staple, with everyone being encouraged to attend at least 2 to 3 a week. If you don't go, you carefully read the notes, looking for clues on what to build next. Most of our features are inspired by users, whether through explicit user requests or the result of behavioral analysis. Knowing what's being built will be used and enjoyed is incredibly motivating.?
Daso: What are the most important skills you've had to develop in your job, and what specific projects or assignments did you work to develop each core skill?
Axelrod: I've learned more about Express, the JavaScript web framework, since starting at BoldVoice. Before BoldVoice, I'd primarily worked with Django and Spring Boot and only used Express once or twice for a hackathon-type project. Although the ideas are the same (request/response, authentication middleware, database clients, etc.), developing skills in a new framework takes some time. It was helpful to write a full CRUD workflow a few times to feel like I had a handle on things truly.
Daso: What's one interesting (non-work related) thing that more people should know about you?
Axelrod: I enjoy thinking about new product ideas. For example, insurance plays an important role in society by reducing an individual's risk of catastrophic expenses. Still, much of the premium paid to insurance companies often go towards advertising and general overhead. I've been playing with the idea of an open-source platform that enables people to organize and self-insure so those unused premiums can be returned to the individuals.
Daso: What's something you want to accomplish in your career that you haven't yet? What motivates you to get there?
Axelrod: I'd like the software that I write in my career to be useful for 100 million user seconds. I'm at about 18 million currently, so I have a long way to go.
Daso: Who should I interview next?
Axelrod: Here are my recommendations:
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1 年Hi sir good day I need a support ????
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1 年Mujhe job chahiye sir please support me
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1 年Nice feature! We're lucky to have you David Axelrod
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